


Slowly in the Dark

by der_tanzer



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-27
Updated: 2011-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:57:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/der_tanzer/pseuds/der_tanzer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eddie wasn't Richie's first lover, but he was his only love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slowly in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Strictly book 'verse.  
> 

We weren’t lovers that summer of ’58. I was too young to know a thing like that was really possible, and he would probably have been too scared to understand, even if I’d been able to explain. So Beverly Marsh was my first lay, but Eddie Kaspbrak was my first love, and now I'm convinced he was probably my only _true_ love. I know he was my first real kiss, in the early winter of ’59. Things changed between him and his mom after that cataclysmic summer. She still worried, still made him do stupid shit like wear his boots and slicker if there was rain in the forecast three days out, but she let him leave the house a little more often. I think it was the way he stood up to her that time in the hospital after he got his arm broken. That scared her a little.

When the snow started that winter, he took to going home with me after school. I could break a path if he needed one, and I never gave him a hard time about holding onto me when there was ice. Any of the others would have done the same for him—they were still his friends, even if we didn’t all gang together anymore—but he didn’t feel the same way about them. He might not have understood it, and it probably did scare him a little, but he felt it, too. I know he did.

And he liked hanging out at my house. He never seemed to need his aspirator when he was over there. My folks were cool, for parents, and they didn’t hover around asking what we were doing every five minutes like his mom did. They let us be loud and goofy and have a good time. Even now, the Toziers are a fun bunch. I wish Eddie knew them.

The first time I kissed him was in January. I remember it was the first day back to school after the big Christmas Blizzard, and it’d started snowing again about an hour before we got out for the day. The sidewalks were a mess, all brittle crusts with fresh snow on top, and he held onto the back of my coat while I made a trail for him. God, I can still feel that. His little hand dug into the fabric, bare skinned and shaking because he couldn’t hold on with those stupid mittens his mom made him wear. The snow got down inside his boots and he was shivering all over by the time we got home.

No one was there, for a wonder. My ma went out for groceries and got caught in the snow, and dad was still at work. We left our coats and boots by the front door and Eddie took off his socks. They were soaking wet. I told him to throw them in with the towels in the laundry room and then we went to my room to get him a dry pair.

There wasn’t really anything to do, so I got out a stack of comics while he put on my socks. Then we just laid there on the floor for I don’t know how long, me on my back and him on his stomach, waving his feet in the air and kind of rubbing them together like they were still cold. All of a sudden, I felt that little hand on my arm, absolutely freezing.

“Jesus, Eds,” I yelled. Not because of the cold, but because it startled the shit out of me. It would have you, too, if you’d had the summer we did.

“I can’t feel my fingers,” he says, and I was so ashamed. Remember, I had just turned thirteen, so shame was both a close friend and a foreign concept. Our parents shamed us, but our friends? Never. Not our _real_ friends, and Eddie was as real as they came.

I asked him why he didn’t say anything sooner and he just shrugged. But the place on my arm where he was touching me was already numb. I picked up his hand and moved it to my stomach, under my sweatshirt. He kept shivering and I moved his hand again every time my skin got cold. I kept my hand over his, holding it through my shirt. After a while, the shivering stopped and he went back to reading his _Avengers_ comic, but he didn’t take his hand away. I picked up my _Archie_ and didn’t say anything. It was nice, really. Friendly.

It wasn’t until I finished my funnybook and reached for another that I realized he was just staring into space. I turned onto my side and his arm kind of slid up around my waist. It was my turn to shiver then and he felt it. He looked around real quick, his face all red, and I felt my own get hot.

“You okay, Eds?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. I just—I got to thinking. Richie, do you think it’s okay for guys to like each other the way they like girls? That is, if they still like girls, too. I mean—I know queers are—are frocked up…”

I realized he was thinking of the leper, Robert Gray, who would do it for a dime, do it any time, even for free, if he could catch you. That had to have messed the kid up. I was surprised he would admit to feeling anything like that, with the images he had to have in his head. But I was feeling it too, and I didn’t want him to go all off in the wrong direction.

“No, man, it’s not like that. Some of them are, sure, but it doesn’t have to be. Guys can be friends, right? Real close friends. It doesn’t have to be weird.”

“Yeah? Because I like girls. I mean, I like Bev and everything, but I also kind of like—I like…” His face was so red I thought he might burst into flame, and all of a sudden I was really scared. I remember that fear like it was this morning. For a few seconds I was terrified he was going to say someone else, and my blood turned cold. If he’d said Bill or Stan or Mike, or even Ben, who might have been fat but he was still a pretty great guy, I don’t know what I would have done. And Bill was the logical choice. He was the leader, the smart, handsome, powerful one, and no one cared if he stuttered. I was a nerdy little four-eyed weirdo whose best Voice still sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. No one was ever going to love me, and I was just resigning myself to that sad fact when Eddie threw himself at me and buried his face against my neck.

I could feel the heat from his blush, felt him trembling like a leaf, and the only thing I could think to do was wrap my arms around him. He shivered and shook for a long time and I started to get scared again. He hardly ever used his aspirator at my house, but maybe he needed it now. Maybe he couldn’t breathe and here I was, crushing the last little bit of air out of him. I loosened my grip and he raised his head, his eyes all wide and shiny. My heart jumped again and I was about to reach for his inhaler myself but he didn’t move. He just laid there and looked at me, his little face all pinched and fearful, and suddenly I understood. I didn’t know shit about sex or love beyond what I learned in the dark tunnels under the city last summer, and that wasn’t really applicable to the situation at hand. But I suddenly I knew everything I needed to handle this situation. I just put my hand on the back of his head and kissed him on the mouth. He gasped and I felt my dick start to get hard. I still wasn’t sure what part it might play in this scenario, but I knew instinctively that it didn’t matter. Not today.

When he pulled away, I let him go. He looked down at me for an eternity, maybe longer, and then kissed me back. That might have been the sweetest moment of my life, and I forgot it for over twenty years. That Derry air is some freaky shit, huh?

He was so earnest and scared, I couldn’t help laughing. I think it pissed him off for a second, and then he was laughing, too. He lay down again, snuggled all up under my arm, and I held him until we heard my mom’s car in the driveway. Then he rolled off and picked up a comic at random, falling into pretend concentration a lot more easily than I did. I had to turn over to hide my hard-on, but when Ma looked in, we were just reading. She invited Eddie to stay for supper and he called his mom for permission. Dad drove him home after, following the plow, and it was like nothing happened. Except something did.

After that, we spent a lot of time together. It was another year and a half before my dad’s company moved us out of state, and I spent every minute of it that I could with Eddie. A lot of the time one of the others was with us, usually Bill or Ben, but I don’t think they noticed. Or if they did, they understood. They always went home first so we had a few minutes alone here and there. But it wasn’t—intense. Not like with Bev in the tunnel. It was more—cuddling. At least at first.

By the time we were fifteen that had changed. We were as horny as any teenage boys are apt to be and we made good use of each other. I said he didn’t use his aspirator at my house? He never had asthma attacks sucking me off, either. But I didn’t ask him to very often, that wasn’t what we were about. He was my best friend.

We didn’t make with the wild and crazy love until we met again as adults. Pushing forty, me divorced and him married to his fat, crazy mother, as much as Beverly was married to Henry Bowers and Bill was married to Bev. That first night at the Town House, he came to my room and asked if I remembered. Did I? It was the first thing that came back when I got into town. I couldn’t get him into bed fast enough. He did have an asthma attack that night, but it wasn’t because of me. Not exactly. It was because he decided he couldn’t go back to his obscene mother/wife. We were going to leave together. There’s just as much call for limo companies in LA as there is in New York. He was terrified of telling his wife (I don’t know her name—he didn’t tell me), but with me to hold his hand, he was going to do it. We had a plan. I loved him and he loved me. There weren’t going to be any adults telling us where to live and what to do anymore.

All the time we were in Derry, reliving old nightmares and refighting old fights, that was what kept me going. I could do anything, no matter how insane or impossible it seemed, for him. I could go back into the sewers and fight the monstrous spider from beyond all time and space if he led me there. I could kill It to protect him. I was sure of it. And Bill and I, we did kill It. But it wasn’t to save Eddie after all. It was to avenge him. Long before we finished off that bloated bitch, Eddie had died. In Beverly’s arms, not mine. That was the hardest part, I thought. When I realized he was dead, that the last thing he was ever going to say to me was _Don’t call me Eds_ , I thought that was the lowest point of my life. I wanted to lie down and die beside him. I might have, except I also wanted to carry him out. He couldn’t spend the rest of eternity in the lair of _It_.

But when we got him through the door and out of the lair, they made me leave him anyway. Down there in the dark, in that foul and evil place. The boy that I loved, the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with, and they made me leave him.

I don’t think they knew, not everything. We’d been careful. Too careful, really. The night Henry broke into his room and tried to kill him, I had gone back to my room for clean clothes so they wouldn’t notice I was wearing the same thing in the morning. Eddie called Bill because that’s what we were supposed to do, and I had to go back up there and see all of that and pretend—what? That we were just friends, whatever the fuck that means? That I didn’t want to carry him straight to the hospital and leave Derry to die its own death without us? Yeah, all of that and more. The sight of his poor broken arm unmanned me almost completely, and I had to light a cigarette and make a joke. If I’d been a little less concerned with being careful, I could have held him that night. I could have comforted him a little during those last hours of his life.

But I didn’t, and the next time I kissed him, it was on the cheek and he was already dead. For the rest of my life, I’ll hate myself for not at least kissing him on the lips. I should have done that. Anyone else would have, and if I couldn’t do it in front of them, where could I? But I didn’t, and now here I am, back in the Derry Town House, getting ready to go home. And Eddie? He’s still down there. _When you dig a tunnel this deep, you call it a mineshaft._ Eddie said that back in the summer of ’58. The summer I fell in love with him. The summer he led us into the lair of It, and then led us safely out. I never would have let him lead us down again if I’d believed he might not come back. We knew it could happen, but I didn’t _believe_ it. I believed in the evil, but not in its power to overcome good. Mike hadn’t died, so somehow that meant Eddie couldn’t. And if he did, I would die, too. We all would. It never occurred to me that only one might fall.

I didn’t kiss him then and now I’ll never get another chance. But I won’t forget again. I forgot after we left the first time, when I was fifteen and had not yet held him and entered his body in the dark of night, but I won’t forget now. We had plans, damn it. It was for real. Not like my failed marriage or his bizarre semi-incestuous one. We were going to be together forever.

I won’t forget that.

I won’t.

***

Richie “Records” Tozier was fifty-two years old when he decided to renovate his house in LA. Most of his things went into storage, and he did a lot of sorting and disposing of old trash first. It was then that he found the notebook with Derry Public Library stamped on the cover. That was strange. Richie was born in Derry and lived there until he was a sophomore in high school, but he thought he’d gotten rid of all his kid’s stuff when he married. He sank down onto a pile of old clothes and flipped it open.

“Some kind of short story?” he muttered to himself as he began to read. It was a strange one, not very well written, and parts of it frightened him badly for reasons he didn’t understand. _Derry?_ Why was it set in his old hometown? And the names were familiar. Eddie Kaspbrak? Beverly Marsh? Stan and Bill and Mike and Ben? Dim echoes from—from where? And why was his own name in it? Who had written this sorrowful tale and included the Tozier family? And why—Richie shivered and slammed the notebook shut but the knowledge wouldn’t go away. _Why was it his handwriting?_

Richie threw the notebook across the room where it landed on a pile of trash. He didn’t need mysteries and romantic intrigue at his age. Not after fifty lonely, loveless years. Well, not entirely lonely, or altogether loveless. But a failed marriage, a few dozen one-nighters, a couple ill-fated long-term relationships, and, if he was being totally honest, more than a couple sweet-faced, willowy, blue-eyed young men, didn’t add up to true love. Richie had always wanted a true love, a soul-mate like the guy in the story had in his Eddie ( _and why was that name so familiar?_ ), but he’d never found it and no longer expected to.

He rubbed his eyes, careful of his contacts, and was surprised to find his cheeks wet with tears.

“Eds,” he whispered, tasting the word, thinking it over. Then he got up and retrieved the notebook from the pile of garbage. It was small, he decided. It wouldn’t take up much space in storage. He had the idea that Eddie had never taken up much space. Except in this fictional Richie’s heart. It wasn’t a happy story, but he found himself almost envying that other Richie, who had at one time been loved.


End file.
